Budget cuts get blame in AF scandal

Updated 11:32 pm, Friday, June 21, 2013

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WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 04: Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh III testifies with U.S. military leaders before the Senate Armed Services Committee on pending legislation regarding sexual assaults in the military June 4, 2013 in Washington, DC. A recent survey of active duty personnel by the Pentagon revealed that 6.1 percent of women and 1.2 percent of men reported receiving "unwanted sexual contact" in the past year. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 04: Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh III testifies with U.S. military leaders before the Senate Armed Services Committee on pending legislation regarding sexual assaults in

Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III field questions from members of the Pentagon press corps May 24.

Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III field questions from members of the Pentagon press corps May 24.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Budget cuts get blame in AF scandal

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The worst sex scandal in Air Force history is partly the result of reduced supervision of recruits and personnel cuts that were ordered in a bid to save money, the service's top commander told the San Antonio Express-News.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III said the thinned ranks of military training instructors and officers at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland are one of five factors behind the scandal.

Other factors, Maj. Gen. Margaret Woodward concluded last year in an investigation of the base, include failures in instructor training and development, reporting and detection, policy and guidance and overall leadership.

“Looking backward now, shame on us because we helped create an environment where we didn't have the supervision necessary to prevent something like this from happening,” Welsh said in an interview Thursday. “Now nobody expects people to perform badly or to behave badly when they're in a position like (a military training instructor) at Lackland, and so we were surprised but were naïve as well, and we've got to make sure we are not that in the future.”

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Welsh, a San Antonio native who now calls Austin home, addressed concerns over a sex scandal that came to light 19 months ago when a basic training instructor was accused of raping one woman and assaulting nine other recruits. Since then, 33 trainers have been investigated for misconduct with 66 victims.

Other cases have surfaced since the instructor, Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, was sentenced to 20 years in prison last summer, including a Houston-area recruiter sentenced to 27 years in prison last week. And outside the nation's capitol, the branch chief of the Air Force's sexual-assault program, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was jailed after a woman was groped in a Crystal City, Va., parking lot.

“Horrible cases have occurred, the crime is horrible every time it occurs, wherever it occurs, and we certainly haven't stopped the problem, which is our fault, and we have to fix this,” said Welsh, who cited the accusations against Krusinski as “stunning, quite frankly, to me and to everybody else.”

“We're doing everything we can (to stop the problem),” he continued, “but it's not for lack of effort, and it's not because every commander is trying to somehow sweep the problem under the rug, which is one of the ways this has been characterized.”

In May, Welsh was widely criticized when he told a congressional panel that a “hook-up mentality” in the younger generation might be responsible for some sexual assaults in the military. His statement appeared to many to be blaming victims, and he later apologized.

As the Air Force pared its troops by tens of thousands, he said, younger replacements were brought in.

Welsh said one impact on Lackland was the selection of military training instructors “who probably didn't have the right maturity level and experience because the Air Force actually got more junior in rank over time as we cut manpower.”

Woodward's investigation led to sweeping changes at Lackland and throughout technical training. She recently was named the head of the Air Force sexual-assault response office.

The recommendations being put in place include assigning two instructors to every basic-training flight, bringing in more women trainers and adding more officers to oversee Lackland's force.

Prior to the scandal, Welsh said, the Air Force didn't stress core leadership responsibilities or how the younger NCOs would manage their newfound authority over recruits. He said institutional barriers hampered the reporting of misconduct.

“And all these things just came together to create an environment that allowed this to happen,” he said. “It's one of those things that you can look back on it and say, 'My gosh, how did this happen?' But we think that's how it happened, no excuses. Clearly it should not have happened.”

Critics and victims have complained that few sexual-assault cases ever go to trial — last year, just 302 of 3,374 reported.

One solution sought by outside the military is stripping commanders of their authority to decide which cases go to trial.

Commanders, acting in their role as a convening authority, typically discuss cases with legal officials in their judge advocate general offices before reaching a decision.

Nancy Parrish, founder of the advocate group Protect Our Defenders, said last week that “having an independent prosecutor decline to take a case to trial is not the same as having the rapist's commander tell the victim he will not support their case.”

But Welsh called the convening authority “part of the fabric of being a commander,” and said an Air Force review of 2,511 court-martial cases over the past three years was telling.

It showed commanders refused to support the judge advocate general's recommendation to go to trial just 22 times. Lawyers successfully appealed 10 cases to higher commanders, he said, while only one of the 12 cases that did not go to a court-martial was a sexual assault.

He went on to say that the Air Force had prosecuted more cases, 66, in the first quarter of 2013 than it did for all of 2011. Welsh credited changes in rules that required wing commanders to decide on prosecuting sexual-assault cases, rather than lesser experienced officers overseeing squadrons and groups.

“So as I look at that again, my job is to try and find the things that will make the most difference and not spend too much time and energy getting distracted by the things that won't really help us change the game,” Welsh said.

Parrish, however, said military leaders have made a weak argument in long contending that commanders must be able to decide when to go to trial or risk losing their ability to maintain good order and discipline.

Commanders still would have a range of disciplinary powers at hand, she said, including nonjudicial punishment.

“If the prosecutor was convinced that they had a good case and the commander did not want to proceed, the prosecutor would be able to go forward anyway,” Parrish said. “Professional, objective prosecutors, who do not share the commanders' inherent conflicts and biases, would ... do a better job.”

If things do not improve after changes are made, Welsh said, the Air Force should be ready to consider other options, “to open the aperture a little bit wider” — though not ending the convening authority's role in ordering trials.

“My personal view is if we can't change what's happening with the trend of this particular crime, we should be open to anything,” he said. “I'm not interested in one more victim being subjected to this crime in our Air Force.”